Holly *!%& this thing runs like a 286!

[Fox5]

Originally posted by: Locut0s

Originally posted by: JLee
needz moar rams.

No kidding. Not likely to happen though.

If it's DDR2, shouldn't cost more than $20 for more.

But just go into msconfig and get rid of all the background apps. Or get him onto Ubuntu.

Oh, and hotmail disables the account after 9 months of inactivity, so just forwarding the mail to gmail won't keep them active.

 

[Phoenix86]

Originally posted by: tenshodo13

Originally posted by: cKGunslinger

Originally posted by: Phoenix86

Originally posted by: lxskllr
512mb is fine for an email/web surfer. Clean out the cruft and it should be good.

Barely, OS + a few web pages can pretty much top 512MB ram. So basically someone who does bills and sends a few e-mails (like grandparents!).

Uh, no. My PC had 512 for the longest time, and I somehow managed to play HL2, Doom3, etc. In fact, only when WoW was becoming annoyingly slow in large cities did I bump up my RAM.

People seem to have short memories.

This. People's Perception of technology has become really short sighted. I ran XP just fine on 512 until I bumped it up to 2 3 months ago. I never had a problem opening firefox and managing a dozen tabs.

Huh?

Take a typical XP install with with normal startup programs (AV, printer controls, not bloated crap). Open 2-3 "normal web pages". You will often be in the 400+MB usage. Hell I have 8 web pages open (bit more than the example but nothing abnormal) in FF3.5 and it's using 280MB of memory.

Your machines required less memory in the past because the programs you were running (namely the OS/browsers) were using less.

 

[Fear No Evil]

My experience is that 512mb was fine with XP until SP2 came out.. then you needed 1gb to run smoothly. RAM is so cheap its stupid not to increase it right now.

 

[DAPUNISHER]

I still have this notebook from '02 with a T-bred 2000+ and 512mb DDR2100 and winXP home, and it runs fine. You just have to do normal maintenance, which is very little work. I would like to run Ubuntu instead of windows, given what I use it for. But, I can't seem to find the drivers I need.

Originally posted by: Fear No Evil
My experience is that 512mb was fine with XP until SP2 came out.. then you needed 1gb to run smoothly. RAM is so cheap its stupid not to increase it right now.

I have sp3, and it runs smoothly for surfing and DVD playback. The huge hold up is the old 4200rpm hdd, but as surfing is OK, I never bothered to upgrade it.

Having it choke on 720p content is what will make me replace it eventually. Can't even properly watch game trailers and stuff on it.

 

[Fox5]

Originally posted by: tenshodo13

Originally posted by: cKGunslinger

Originally posted by: Phoenix86

Originally posted by: lxskllr
512mb is fine for an email/web surfer. Clean out the cruft and it should be good.

Barely, OS + a few web pages can pretty much top 512MB ram. So basically someone who does bills and sends a few e-mails (like grandparents!).

Uh, no. My PC had 512 for the longest time, and I somehow managed to play HL2, Doom3, etc. In fact, only when WoW was becoming annoyingly slow in large cities did I bump up my RAM.

People seem to have short memories.

This. People's Perception of technology has become really short sighted. I ran XP just fine on 512 until I bumped it up to 2 3 months ago. I never had a problem opening firefox and managing a dozen tabs.

Windows XP, the base install, is fine on 256MB of ram. Get all the updates, and I'd say even 512MB isn't a fun experience, and 256MB is unusable. The service packs and all the updates really helped stability, features, security, and even performance, but they bloated up the memory requirements considerably.

I would like to run Ubuntu instead of windows, given what I use it for. But, I can't seem to find the drivers I need.

What drivers do you need? Have you tried installing the latest version of Ubuntu? It may just be able to find all your drivers automagically.

 

[Locut0s]

Originally posted by: Fox5

Originally posted by: Locut0s

Originally posted by: JLee
needz moar rams.

No kidding. Not likely to happen though.

If it's DDR2, shouldn't cost more than $20 for more.

But just go into msconfig and get rid of all the background apps. Or get him onto Ubuntu.

Oh, and hotmail disables the account after 9 months of inactivity, so just forwarding the mail to gmail won't keep them active.

Actually you can't even forward the mail. Microsoft has made it so that you can only forward mail to other hotmail accounts. Thanks MS :| Thankfully however Gmail allows you to retrieve mail from other accounts by logging in using your username and password, essentially the PULL vs the PUSH of forwarding. This should also get around the 9 month problem as each time you check your mail Gmail is actually physically logging into those hotmail accounts.

 

[Locut0s]

Originally posted by: Fear No Evil
My experience is that 512mb was fine with XP until SP2 came out.. then you needed 1gb to run smoothly. RAM is so cheap its stupid not to increase it right now.

I know desktop RAM is really cheap but Laptop ram too? I've never upgraded the RAM in a laptop. Used to be quite a premium you'd have to pay.

 

[DAPUNISHER]

Originally posted by: Fox5

I would like to run Ubuntu instead of windows, given what I use it for. But, I can't seem to find the drivers I need.

What drivers do you need? Have you tried installing the latest version of Ubuntu? It may just be able to find all your drivers automagically.

I am using the 9.04, but the old ATI chipset+IGP drivers may be the issue? It just won't complete the install, and even trying to boot from the ubuntu disc gets no further than safe mode where it freezes up.

 

[yhelothar]

Disable anti-virus software and disable administrator privledges on his account.
Anti-virus software is like a friggen virus in itself on older comps. It scans every folder that's ever accessed and bogs the computer down to shit.
I can't even count with my fingers how many times I've seen a decently spec'ed comp that seemed it should at least be a snappy web machine take forever on everything until I hit disable on the AV software, and it turned from night to day.
That, and remove all the useless shit from the system tray/msconfig/add remove programs.

 

[RichUK]

Originally posted by: tenshodo13

Originally posted by: Locut0s

Originally posted by: guyver01

Originally posted by: TruePaige
TSR = Terminate but Stay Resident for any non-techies who come in.

shit.. is there anything nowadays besides virii and trojans (other than antivirus proggies) that run as TSRs?

In my experience? If you are computer illiterate your system tray quickly fills up with tens of apps just wasting memory and CPU cycles. Usually these are apps meant to augment the launching of the parent application. Things like Adobe PDF reader keeps 1/2 the app loaded all the time to reduce load times. Quicktime does something similar. 1/2 the photo sharing applications out there install TSRs so that they can detect when you plug in your digicam. ACER, ASUS, and other laptop manufacturers install their own slew of "helper" apps to brand the windows desktop with an ASUS bar or whatever. It goes on and on and on.

I hate this SO MUCH. Everytime I install a new program, I always go into msconfig and check that stupid stuff isn't starting up. I can't believe that people can tolerate like 15 icons in their system tray.

It?s even worse when they don?t hide the icons and they consume most of the taskbar.

 

[swbsam]

Originally posted by: Locut0s

Originally posted by: Fear No Evil
My experience is that 512mb was fine with XP until SP2 came out.. then you needed 1gb to run smoothly. RAM is so cheap its stupid not to increase it right now.

I know desktop RAM is really cheap but Laptop ram too? I've never upgraded the RAM in a laptop. Used to be quite a premium you'd have to pay.

So you're not the expert you claim to be! Your granddad should run to Best Buy and get some professionals involved

Dude, seriously - get ccleaner, uninstall a bunch of crap and run a registry clean, you'll be golden..

 

[hanoverphist]

Originally posted by: Phoenix86

Originally posted by: tenshodo13

Originally posted by: cKGunslinger

Originally posted by: Phoenix86

Originally posted by: lxskllr
512mb is fine for an email/web surfer. Clean out the cruft and it should be good.

Barely, OS + a few web pages can pretty much top 512MB ram. So basically someone who does bills and sends a few e-mails (like grandparents!).

Uh, no. My PC had 512 for the longest time, and I somehow managed to play HL2, Doom3, etc. In fact, only when WoW was becoming annoyingly slow in large cities did I bump up my RAM.

People seem to have short memories.

This. People's Perception of technology has become really short sighted. I ran XP just fine on 512 until I bumped it up to 2 3 months ago. I never had a problem opening firefox and managing a dozen tabs.

Huh?

Take a typical XP install with with normal startup programs (AV, printer controls, not bloated crap). Open 2-3 "normal web pages". You will often be in the 400+MB usage. Hell I have 8 web pages open (bit more than the example but nothing abnormal) in FF3.5 and it's using 280MB of memory.

Your machines required less memory in the past because the programs you were running (namely the OS/browsers) were using less.

true dat. every iteration of quickbooks has bloated the amount of resources used. before i could run on 256 ram and have no issues, now i keep them up at 4gb, its so cheap now theres no point not to. my firefox is using 153k mb at the moment. i have to keep pretty good specs for work systems here for a select few people but not all. mine is the best in house, i make sure of that but ouot of the different aspects people here actually need their puters for, i run all their stuff at one point or another plus a handful of apps that are mine nly. can get taxing on any system, not to mention the registry issues with installing and upgrading that many different programs. if the companies would make cleaner installs and uninstallers it wouldnt be that big a deal tho.

 

[Fox5]

Originally posted by: DAPUNISHER

Originally posted by: Fox5

I would like to run Ubuntu instead of windows, given what I use it for. But, I can't seem to find the drivers I need.

What drivers do you need? Have you tried installing the latest version of Ubuntu? It may just be able to find all your drivers automagically.

I am using the 9.04, but the old ATI chipset+IGP drivers may be the issue? It just won't complete the install, and even trying to boot from the ubuntu disc gets no further than safe mode where it freezes up.

There should be drivers for those.

When you get to the boot screen, hit the advanced option keys (one of the f keys, should say on the bottom of the screen) and select low res vga mode or something along those lines.

That, or use the alternate install cd (text based dos like install). Make sure you're connected via a hard-wire to the internet so when it scans for updates it hopefully finds the drivers.

 

[EricMartello]

Originally posted by: Locut0s
So I agreed to help fix a few issues with my Grandfathers laptop. Well I have it at home right now and the thing runs like a fucking snail! Granted it's no Ferrari, the thing runs on an AMD Turion 2.0 Ghz CPU with 512 MB of RAM and ..... (wait a sec I just typed that as I'm looking at the specs, 512MB of RAM!!!).. and it's running winXP with a crap load of TSR apps running in the background

Time for some spring cleaning.

He also has like 2 or 3 Hotmail accounts in addition to his ISP account. I'm going to give him a Gmail account and forward everything to that.

TSRs you say? Better check his autoexec.bat and config.sys... -.- Ohhh...wait...you meant SERVICES.

Gmail = good for spamming, bad for much else. DO you really want google spying on every single bit of mail that you get? Please...what if your grandpa is trying to have a secret affair on the internet? Stop and think man...show him how to use telnet.

 

[DAPUNISHER]

Originally posted by: Fox5
select low res vga mode or something along those lines. I did that

That, or use the alternate install cd (text based dos like install). Make sure you're connected via a hard-wire to the internet so when it scans for updates it hopefully finds the drivers.

I was not hard wired though, that is a good idea. Thanks. :beer: